Friday Finished Object

No crafting to show for this week, still going with the socks.

Here's some apricot cashew bliss balls instead. Bliss balls are the latest craze around here in my search for healthy snack food.

To make: br />
Place the following in the bowl of your food processor:
1.5 cups raw cashews
1.5 cups dried apricots
1/3 cup of desiccated coconut
2 tblsp honey
juice of half a lemon

Process on highest speed until the mixture is well combined and starting to stick together. If your mixture is too sticky add a little more desiccated coconut, if it's too dry, a little more lemon juice or water.
Roll into balls then roll in extra desiccated coconut.

Further Adventures of a Breadstick Toastie

You can use the little breadstick toasties I posted about the other day to make the most delish croutons for a caesar salad. Proceed exactly as you would for the standard toasties, but after you have spritzed the second side with olive oil, sprinkle them with grated parmesan cheese before popping back under the grill. If you are feeling extra adventurous you might even like to rub the bread with a garlic clove first.

Now that you've got your croutons sorted you may as well make your own caesar dressing. This is too easy and tastes like the dressings that you'd get on a restaurant salad, not some pale imitation from the supermarket shelves.

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You will need:

1 raw egg

1 tblsp white vinegar

2 tsp smooth mustard

6 anchovy fillets

3 cloves garlic, sliced

1/2 cup mild olive oil

the juice of half a lemon

Put the first 5 ingredients in the bowl of your food processor and whiz until combined. Add the oil in a slow stream while the processor is running. Then allow it to run for a minute or two afterwards until the desired consistency is reached. At this point I give the dressing a little test taste and add the lemon juice a little bit at a time until it tastes like I think it should! We do like our caesar dressing strong around here, so if you'd prefer it a little less pungent just cut down on the amount of garlic and/or anchovy you use.

Now all you need is some cos, a couple of boiled eggs, some fried bacon, a bit of shaved parmesan and you're good to go!

Breadstick Toasties

These little toasties are great with cheeses and dips, as an easy home made alternative to store bought crackers.

First you will need to make yourself some tasty baguettes. I make mine by putting:

1.5 cups water

1 tsp dried yeast

2 tsp sugar

4 cups white flour
and 2 tsp salt
in my breadmaker on the dough cycle.

Once the dough cycle is complete remove the dough and break into eight pieces.

Roll these into breadstick shapes. Leave out to rise for 30 minutes, then bake in a 200 degrees centigrade oven for 20 minutes.

These breadsticks are super yummy fresh out of the oven smeared with butter. They also work well as hot dog buns, but watch out they are filling as they are denser than your average bakery breadstick.

To make the toasties, once your breadstick has cooled, cut it into slices about a centimeter wide. You should get about eight per breadstick. This is even better done when the breadsticks are slightly stale.

Lay these pieces out flat on your baking tray, spritz generously with olive oil and place under a hot griller until they are golden but not burnt. You will want to leave them in as long as you can get away with, because if they're under done they'll just taste like stale bread, not quite what we're going for! Take them out of the oven, turn over, spritz the other side with the olive oil and again grill until golden.

After grilling both sides, lay the toasties out on a baking rack to crisp up. These are best eaten the day you made them.

We are having some this afternoon with a tasty looking Rough Red from our Food Connect cheese club.

Apple Crumble

This has been one of my favourite seasonal treats since I was a little girl.

Recipe from the amazing Exclusively Food, embellished slightly by adding lemon zest, vanilla and sultanas to the apple, and using rolled oats, cinnamon and almond meal instead of the chopped nuts in the crumble.

Recycled Jack-o-Lantern

Yummm

Pumpkin pie recipe here.

I planted a couple of Potimarron pumpkin seeds this morning. Hopefully I will have a little harvest like this later in the year. I have never attempted to grow this variety before but I love the vivid orange of the potimarrons, they look how I imagine a pumpkin should look. They are supposed to be fabulous in a soup too, with a real chestnutty taste. I love pumpkins, they are just so generous, don't you think?

Potimarron image from: http://www.windward.org/notes/notes67/walt6719.htm

Cupcakes Part 3 - Butterfly Cakes

Wow, I have to say these were a disaster!! So bad, I couldn't even bring myself to post a photo. They were supposed to be sponge cake, and they did have a very "spongy" consistency, however I don't think a cupcake with the texture of one of those green and yellow sponges that you use to do the dishes was quite what I had in mind. And they tasted very, very eggy. Forget trying to cut out little cones for the butterfly wings, these babies were so sunken.

Funnily enough the recipe has a proviso at the top "At the Crabapple Bakery we use the basic vanilla cupcake batter for our butterfly cakes, but here's a sponge cake recipe anyway...". Ummm, gee thanks. Well my verdict is save yourself the hassle and the 25 minutes of handbeating and do as the do at the bakery and use the vanilla cupcake batter for your Butterfly Cakes.

So old faithful standby Sultana Slice was called in to action. Thank goodness for old faithfuls!

Sultana Slice with Coffee Icing

125g butter, softened 1/2 cup caster sugar 1 tsp vanilla essence 1 egg 1 cup self raising flour 1 cup sultanas 2 cups icing sugar 2 tsp instant coffee granules 1 tblsp butter, melted Flaked or slivered almonds, toasted

Beat together the butter, sugar and vanilla essence until combined. Add the egg and beat in. Stir in the flour, then the sultanas. Press into a lined and greased square baking pan. Bake at 180 degrees centigrade for 25 minutes Leave in pan until almost cool For icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl, add the butter. Mix the coffee granules with a small amount of boiling water to dissolve. Add to icing sugar mixture. Whisk together, adding further boiling water until the desired consistency is reached. You will want this quite runny.

Ice slice when cool and top with toasted flaked or slivered almond.

This little slice never lets me down! I think some tasty variations would be dried apricots instead of the sultanas, with a lemon icing, or dried cranberries with a white choc icing.

Cupcakes Part 2 - Dino Rocks

The second recipe in the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook is for Dinosaur Rock Cupcakes, so named because they are decorated with colourful buttercream icing and decorated with "dinosaur rock candy" and sold to little boys on their birthday.

This is a real crowd-pleaser recipe. The cupcakes were light and fluffy but still moist. And who doesn't like chocolate cake? They are made with cocoa rather than real chocolate, so there's a good chance you'd have everything you need in the pantry to begin with. I used Cadbury cocoa but next time I would splash out on some good stuff as even with a cup of cocoa in the batter they still didn't taste overly chocolate-y (but maybe that's always the case when you use cocoa instead of actual chocolate).

DS 7, who incidentally doesn't usually like chocolate cake, was a big fan of these.

For the technical stuff, I cooked them at 180 degrees (centigrade) for 20 mins. Instead of the gaudy coloured buttercream I iced them with a choc glaze:

Choc Glaze Icing

2 cups icing sugar

2 tblsp cocoa

sift together and whisk in boiling water in a steady stream until you reach the desired consistency, you will want it a bit runny. This is a setting glaze so you will need to work quick!

Makes 24, as the recipe states.

Cupcakes!

Knowing my love of cake, my mum bought me the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook a month or so ago. The actual Crabapple Bakery, which was in Melbourne, went out of buisness last year, but I'm sure that's no reflection of the quality of the cakes in the book!

I thought I'd work my way through the recipes in the book and post photos and reviews as I go.

First off is the quintessential Vanilla Daisy Cupcake. This is a rich recipe, calling for four eggs and a tablespoon of vanilla extract. Not surprisingly it makes a lovely dense moist cake. Just make sure you use the full amount of vanilla or your cakes could be left tasting a little "eggy". The recipe calls for baking them at 170 degrees (centrigrade), however I found this left some of the cakes a little underdone, so 180 degrees for 18 minutes, worked better for me. I got 19 cakes out of this amount of batter.

I iced the cakes with my own recipe for Cream cheese frosting:

60g cream cheese

30g butter

2 cups sifted icing sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

enough milk to make into a smooth icing

colouring as desired (I didn't bother).

DH pronounced these the best cupcakes he has ever eaten, which is high praise as he makes a mean cupcake himself (yes, I do have the best husband in the world :) ). They really are good cupcakes, and I will use this as my stock standard vanilla cupcake recipe from now on.

Baking Day

I love to bake! Mostly because I love to eat home baked goodies. No store bought cookies cross these lips.

I did go through a recent (short) phase where I announced to anyone who would listen that "I have stopped baking". It was to prove to myself that I could survive without eating baked goods every day. And I did, I survived. But it was a bleak 2 weeks. And then I had to bake again. It was choc brownies that broke the awful drought and boy were they good.

If you haven't seen Joy the Baker's blog, you must pop over. That is some serious food porn right there! Her jam cookies were the focus of today's baking efforts. Mine don't look quite as photogenic as Joy's (maybe a bit overzealous with the mixing in of the jam...) but they smell amazing and i managed to use up one of the 4 half empty bottles of store bought jam which have been languishing in my fridge for who-knows-how-long. This is quite a nifty bonus as I am on a crusade to use up all such items from my fridge/freezer/pantry which i will not be replacing.

Happy cooking